FAQ

FAQ

Does TerraForge download world data automatically? No. Production servers only read local, prepared data — nothing is fetched at runtime. You prepare it offline with the CLI first. See Data Sources and Installation.

Can I generate the whole Earth? Technically yes, but plan for the storage cost — roughly 1.5 TB of DEM alone at 30 m resolution. Most servers prepare a bounded region instead. See the storage table in Data Sources.

Will TerraForge generate villages, roads or other structures? No, never. generation.natural-only: true is the default and cannot be disabled — the generator contains no code path that places man-made structures, and TerraForge refuses to start if an infrastructure.* switch is ever turned on.

Can I add roads, villages or other structures with a datapack or another plugin? Yes — TerraForge only controls what it generates. Anything layered on top afterwards (structures, datapacks, another world-gen plugin) is outside its scope.

Does TerraForge work with an existing world? No. It generates new chunks as a Paper ChunkGenerator on the world it is registered for. Existing terrain elsewhere is untouched, but you cannot retrofit real-world terrain onto chunks that already exist without a seam at the boundary.

Can I change the scale, projection or origin after generating chunks? Don't. Those values are baked into every generated chunk. Changing them creates a permanent seam between old and new terrain. Pick them once, before opening the world to players. See Projections and Scale.

Do I need Towny or BlueMap? No — both are optional and detected automatically at runtime. Without them, TerraForge runs normally; with them, towns get real coordinates and the web map gets city/country labels. See Towny Integration and BlueMap Integration.

My server is laggy — is it TerraForge? Check /earth cache stats first, then see Performance and Troubleshooting. Pregenerating the play area (see Pregeneration) removes most of the runtime cost.

Where do I get elevation/land-cover/boundary data? See Data Sources for recommended datasets, resolutions and licences. Copernicus DEM GLO-30 is the recommended elevation source; it's free with attribution.

Is TerraForge safe to use on a production server right now? It's labeled 0.1.x preview software. It works and is actively used, but breaking changes to world/data formats are still possible between minor versions — always check the changelog before upgrading, and keep backups.

I found a bug — where do I report it? Open a bug report with the details listed in Troubleshooting. Security issues go through SECURITY.md privately instead.

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